County’s Poor Areas Tripled, Study Finds

The number of poor neighborhoods in the Los Angeles region has more than tripled over the last 30 years, with poor and very poor neighborhoods becoming more geographically concentrated in suburban areas, according to a UCLA-Brookings Institution study released Monday.

The study, titled “The Trajectory of Poor Neighborhoods in Southern California, 1970-2000,” reports that immigration and the region’s economy are responsible for a steady increase in the area’s poverty rate and a shift in the location of poor neighborhoods.

“In the past three decades, the Los Angeles region has witnessed a large-scale spatial reorganization of poverty,” the report states. “Where once concentrated poverty was confined to neighborhoods in the inner city, it has since spread to the suburbs.”

The study was written by researchers with UCLA’s Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. In a review of regional census data, researchers found that many of the area’s very poor were concentrated in neighborhoods around downtown L.A.

During the 1990s, downtown Los Angeles and the Long Beach port area saw many poor neighborhoods worsen and become very poor neighborhoods -- areas where the poverty rate exceeded 40%. The urban ring of poverty extended into the cities of Inglewood and Hawthorne, while the San Fernando Valley, Lancaster and Palmdale also saw a sharp increase in concentrated neighborhood poverty, the report said.

This ring of very poor neighborhoods follows the Harbor and Long Beach freeway corridors south to San Pedro, as well as the Ventura Freeway between Pasadena and Burbank.

In 1970, not quite a third of the region’s population lived in areas with a poverty rate of at least 20%. In the year 2000, 57% did, according to the study.

Areas outside urban Los Angeles experienced the most rapid expansions of poverty, especially during the 1990s. Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of poor neighborhoods in suburban Los Angeles County quadrupled, while it tripled in surrounding counties and remained relatively constant in urban L.A.

The report says that international migration has played a major role, as well as the loss of many well-paying manufacturing jobs in the region. A large supply of less-skilled workers has depressed wages and created more competition in the labor market, contributing to slow wage growth and limited economic mobility, the report said.

Racial and ethnic features of area poverty have also changed, the report said. The Latino proportion of the population living in very poor neighborhoods increased more than threefold between 1970 and 2000, while the black share of the population living in very poor neighborhoods declined dramatically.